On the Twelfth Day of December

On the Twelfth Day of December

I get excited about weird things (Groundhog Day, cloth diapering, bread, etc), so it shouldn’t really come as any surprise that I’ve been dying to celebrate Noel’s 12/12/12 birthday for almost a year. When one has a birthday on such a cool day, one must celebrate in style. So I plotted, planned, and managed to keep secrets (no small feat for me).  I wanted the day to start off right from the very beginning, so at midnight (12 am) Noel started receiving emails every hour for the first twelve hours of his birthday. (I used Right Inbox to send the ones from 12-7 since I didn’t want to be waking up any more than our children already force us to.) When I woke up way too early to feed the baby, I hid a dozen dark chocolate treats for Noel to find throughout the day. Then I sent Noel to work with two dozen double coconut muffins to share with his co-workers and half way through his work day I emailed him a playlist of twelve songs to help him survive his grueling half-day.

One of our goals was also to take 12 pictures during the day, which of course is no small challenge for us. Thus, this ridiculous picture.

Noel came home at twelve to find that I’d gotten rid of the kids so we could go on a noon date. (Thanks a million, Serin!) Now what do we do when we have an afternoon all to ourselves? We go on a six mile trail run, duh! (Here’s a story problem for you: If you have 2 people each running 6 miles, what is the total amount of miles run?  12 of course!) Now, many people would not consider running to be a very fun date, but since the kids crashed the party we don’t get to run together that often and when we do we have to haul the double jogger, so we never trail run. This made our hardcore six mile course both extremely fun and extremely difficult.

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After quick showers, we grabbed some lunch and went to the grocery store. Do you know how wonderful it is to grocery shop without grabby little hands? I think we did our shopping in twelve minutes flat. Then we picked up the kids. They’d hardly even missed us. Ellen was sound asleep and Cooper was hoping he could be adopted so Tanner could be his older brother.

Can you be my big brother?

We’d had plans to make a fancy dinner,  but were so exhausted that we opted to defrost some soup. Noel decided to take a nap while I slaved over the stove and Cooper kindly found him a blanket so they could snuggle.

Snuggles

After dinner, we divided the decadent chocolate caramel cheesecake I had made into twelve slices.

Delicious

By this point, the kids were on the verge of melt-downs, so we put them to bed twelve minutes early. Once they were asleep which was sadly way more than twelve minutes later and Noel was done fielding his half a dozen birthday phone calls, we watched Midnight in Paris and I gave Noel a twelve minute back rub. Before falling into bed just before midnight, we read some words from a former member of the quorum of the twelve apostles and fell soundly asleep for twelve hours until someone started screaming. It was a pretty good 12/12/12 at our house, you might even say it had energetic significance, or something like that.

8 thoughts on “On the Twelfth Day of December

  1. Awesome! What a cool birthday!

    I love the running idea. I would love to run with David (stroller-free)… and I’m glad you added your miles together to equal 12. I was thinking you might run 12 each?? Good call! 🙂

  2. I love that first picture of you two. Did you put it on an auto timer? lol

    Noel, don’t be sad about missing “no socks day”, You can wear a kilt to church instead.

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